Apple's got to be having a laugh at our expense!
by Alan Lacey
on
Jul 20, 2008 at 11:18:52 am
For a day or so now I've been experimenting with different compressions for HD web streaming by using Compressor out of FSC2 and with a deadline looming.
I really appreciate the little progress bar that Compressor displays to give me 'some' indication of how long I've got to wait (and believe me h264 means you certainly do some hanging around!)
But WHY OH WHY do Apple's software engineers give the totally meaningless time remaining readout??? As I sit here waiting for for next test result, it turns out to be about a 25min render on my MBP, I've watched the indicated remaining time jump from a predicted 5 mins to about 55 minutes in the first few seconds and then sit hovering around 50 mins, neither reducing or increasing much for the next 25 mins!
Am I alone in thinking this is less than useless and more of a sick joke at our expense?
Even the progress bar climbs to half way and then suddenly the job's finished.
Re: Apple's got to be having a laugh at our expense! by Matte Blume on Jul 20, 2008 at 11:24:53 am
It has always been that way.
My first brush with this was when I first started editing on Avid.
Eventually it will just be a memory and story we all tell about, "Remember when we use to have to WAIT for rendering so LONG that they had a little "thermometer/timer" on the screen?"
Re: Apple's got to be having a laugh at our expense! by walter biscardi on Jul 20, 2008 at 11:39:53 am
[Alan Lacey]"I really appreciate the little progress bar that Compressor displays to give me 'some' indication of how long I've got to wait (and believe me h264 means you certainly do some hanging around!)
"
Our G5 Quad 2.5, Mac Pro Quad 3.0 and Mac Pro Octo Core 3.2 all display time remaining correctly. We had an issue with one combination of Leopard and Quicktime causing this issues, but the latest updates all took care of it.
And run in a Cluster mode. Doubles to quadruples the speed of the compressions. Better than realtime with the Octo. I.e. a 9 minute clip takes 3 - 4 minutes to compress.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: Apple's got to be having a laugh at our expense! by Jeremy Garchow on Jul 20, 2008 at 5:02:17 pm
Walter is referring to a virtual cluster and it only works best in machines with more than two cores. Your MBP won't benefit from it. Check out barefears.com and they talk a bit about it. What happens is the job gets segmented into pieces and rendered separately then recombined into one piece. It works swimmingly and h264 jobs and also mpeg2 jobs really fly. Flip4mac does not benefit from it as it doesn't use compressor's utilities like that.
I should add that if you turn on deniterlacing or retiming or resize to best quality. It really slows things down.
Re: Apple's got to be having a laugh at our expense! by Wayne Carey on Jul 21, 2008 at 3:15:25 pm
It's a service of Apple QMaster inside your System Preferences window.
Open up System Preferences - click on Apple QMaster. If sharing is on, click the button labeled "Stop Sharing" and tell it 0 minutes to shut down. Highlight the line in serivces labeled Compressor. Click on the button labeled "Options for selected service". If you have a Mac Pro system - Quad or Octocore, select the number of instances to be 4 for a Quadcore or 8 for an Octocore system. Click "Ok" to close the box. Now at the bottom of the page, click on the "Start Sharing" button to start the services.
You, now, have a virtual cluster built. In Compressor, set all you setting for what you are planning to compress. When you click on "Submit" to start compressing, look at the drop down menu called Cluster. You'll now see your computer name listed as a cluster. Submit this and you'll have 4 or 8 processors working on compressing your program to whatever you like.
That's it!
_______________________________
Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
www.schazamproductions.com
http://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey
[Ernie Santella]"How would it speed up Compressing Mpeg2 for DVD from HD and SD timelines? I'm running a Intel Pro (Quad 2.66 8GB RAM)"
It takes your movie and basically divides and conquers using multiple instances of Compressor and efficiently spreads the workflow over the number of instances you have defined in the QMaster prefs. At the end, everything is put back together in one movie. It works very well. Does that answer your question or were you asking something different?
Re: Apple's got to be having a laugh at our expense! by Daniel Vockins on Aug 28, 2008 at 12:43:00 am
Hi,
Thanks for the advice but I'm still having problems! When I click "system preferences" and then "QMASTER" and then the "compressor" line under "services" I cannot click the "options for selected service" to increase the number of cores. Interestingly, when I click the "rendering" button beneath I can then click the options button to change the number of "instances" for that line. The problem is not related to accidentally not clicking the "stop sharing" button either - sharing is off.
Re: Apple's got to be having a laugh at our expense! by Ben Scott on Sep 1, 2008 at 8:37:11 pm
sometimes the install of compressor and final cut studio gets screwed, mine did
now there is a fcp uninstaller on the web which is very useful
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Check my podcast at http://cowcast.creativecow.net/final_cut_pro/index.html
or my site at
http://www.benscottarts.co.uk/ - - - - - - - - -
Re: Apple's got to be having a laugh at our expense! by Ben Scott on Jul 21, 2008 at 7:36:47 pm
if you have a look at the podcast I have made up for Cow there is a little video on setting up qmaster for quick cluster
also useful to point out to newbies to batching that quicktime reference movies and copying from one drive where media to other physical drive will also drastically improve compressor speeds, as will sending FCP quicktime movie (not self contained and using this temp file into compressor rather than exporting straight from fcp to compresor)
funny to see someone else with my name using benscottproductions as website nothing to do with myself
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Check my podcast at http://cowcast.creativecow.net/final_cut_pro/index.html
or my site at
http://www.benscottarts.co.uk/ - - - - - - - - -
